How to find all unused Sitecore Templates?

Recently one of the customers had a need to identify all of the templates that are not in use. We could go through all of the templates manually and verify all the links but with PowerShell we can do that much faster. Here is a script that will generate a report (that you can later download as Excel).

In this report, you will see all the templates and references – then with the help of Excel filtering you can filter out the rows without any references to get the list of unused templates.

$itemList = @()
$allPaths = @(    
    "master:\templates\Feature",
    "master:\templates\Foundation",
    "master:\templates\Project"
    )

ForEach($path in $allPaths)
{
    $itemList += Get-ChildItem $path -Recurse | Where-Object {
        $_.TemplateID -ne "{0437FEE2-44C9-46A6-ABE9-28858D9FEE8C}" -and $_.TemplateID -ne "{85ADBF5B-E836-4932-A333-FE0F9FA1ED1E}" -and $_.FullPath -notLike "*/System/*" -and $_.FullPath -notLike "*/Experience Accelerator/*" -and $_.FullPath -notLike '*/JSS Experience Accelerator/*' -and $_.FullPath -notLike '*$name*' -and $_.TemplateID -ne "{E269FBB5-3750-427A-9149-7AA950B49301}" -and $_.TemplateID -ne "{455A3E98-A627-4B40-8035-E683A0331AC7}" -and $_.TemplateID -ne "{A46706F7-EAF8-4575-9860-A85B6F17C5EB}" -and $_.TemplateID -ne "{239F9CF4-E5A0-44E0-B342-0F32CD4C6D8B}" -and $_.Name -ne "__Standard Values"
    }
}

$reportProps = @{
    Title = "Templates references"
    InfoTitle = "This report shows all references of the templates"
    InfoDescription = "Total entries found: $($itemList.length)"
    PageSize = 25
}

$report = New-Object System.Collections.Generic.List[PSObject]

ForEach ($item in $itemList)
{
    Write-Host "Referrers for "+ $item.FullPath
    $referrers = Get-ItemReferrer -Item $item
    $referrersPaths = New-Object System.Collections.Generic.List[String]
    $referrers| ForEach-Object -Process { $referrersPaths.Add($_.FullPath) }
    
    $newObject = New-Object PSObject @{__Icon = $item.__Icon; DisplayName = $item.DisplayName; FullPath = $item.FullPath; ID = $item.ID; Status = $status; Referrers = ($referrersPaths -join "|")}
    $report.Add($newObject)
}


$report | Show-ListView @reportProps -Property `
    @{ Label = "Item Name"; Expression = { $_.DisplayName } },
    @{ Label = "Path"; Expression = { $_.FullPath} },
    @{ Label = "Id"; Expression = { $_.ID } }
    @{ Label = "Referrers"; Expression = { $_.Referrers } }
Close-Window

From the list of all paths we exclude things like:

• folders
• standard values
• SXA templates
• system templates
• and few more